Forgiven me,forgiven them,and wanted to be a part of this with us?
I wish, more than anything, I knew.
“Noelle!” a voice calls out to me, stopping me in my tracks. As I turn, I spot a familiar head of grey hair pushing her way over to me. “There you are. I thought I saw you.”
My entire body stiffens.
Jared’s mother, Evelyn.
Fuck…
“Hey.” I manage, swallowing back my anxiety.
Her fur-trimmed coat is bundled tight up to her chin, her face pinched with disapproval.
She’s a formidable woman, her silver hair always perfectly coiffed on top of her head.
Her eyes are always sharp as icicles. “I heard about last night. Scaring my poor boy off when he was just checking on his son… You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
Annoyance flares hot in my chest, but I swallow it, glancing at Grant and Dean who are just ahead of me with Eli.
Which is probably for the best since I don’t want Eli witnessing any of this.
Evelyn is the sole reason I’m convinced Jared keeps coming back around. Aside from wanting to torture me, this woman has been hellbent on adopting Eli as her grandson and never returning him.
I’ve heard through the grapevine over the past year that she’s been pushing Jared to marry someone with the single intention of giving her grandkids.
Why she’s decided to hyperfocus on my son, I’ll probably never know, but it’s so damn annoying that I’m close to filing a report with the cops against her too.
After Eli was born, I was foolish and desperate for him to have a father figure beyond my dad.
A man who’d come home from work and laugh with us over dinner, the kind of two-parent picture that had been the background of every holiday memory I ever had.
I convinced myself he needed that illusion of normalcy more than he needed whatever safety I could actually give him on my own.
Jared walked into that part of my life like a solution to a problem I had no idea how to fix.
He was handsome in that tired, movie-star way. He wanted to be needed and I, stupid and hungry for anything that looked like rescue, let him be. At first he played the role perfectly.
Charming in public, doting with a sippy-cup when Eli wanted it, murmuring sweet things to me in the dark that had me imagining a future I might actually have a chance at getting.
The lies were small at first, easy to forgive, and I forgave them because I wanted them to be true.
Then the year mark came and I caught him. His mask slipped and I saw the truth: he’d never actually cared about Eli the way a father should, never cared about me either.
We were just props used as evidence Jared could present to the world to look respectable.
A bargaining chip for his mother to back off and to stay in my bed on his terms.
All the while leading a double life with another woman behind my back.
When I pushed him out of my life, I thought that would be the end of it.
I imagined a clean break, a chance to start fresh and forget any of that ever happened.
But he kept coming back.
Short appearances outside my shop before the cops chased him off, drunken shouting at the end of my dad’s driveway in the middle of the night before a shotgun was pointed at him, text messages threaded with guilt over me not giving him a second chance, or an opportunity to explain himself.
